Food of Jyväskylä

While sitting at home can be a pleasurable experience that oscillates between eating and sleeping, food doesn't just magically appear on your plate. Somebody makes it and you make the choice of what you eat: while practicing social distancing you have to take extra care on what and how you nourish yourself. Today I'll give you a quick overview of what you can eat in pandemic-time Jyväskylä!

Even if restaurants popular with young people in Jyväskylä such as Venn and Rentukka are still open, it might not be the most responsible choice to go a dine with large groups of people. If you don't know how to cook, now is the time to learn.

The student villages trusty 24h S-Market is only a 10-minute walk away if you live in Kortepohja and it's got everything you need for a healthy and diverse diet. Youths sometimes ignore the greens on the plate when making food themselves, instead preferring noodles or frozen food, but the importance of fresh vegetables is not to be dismissed. Just a couple tomatoes and a few leafs of spinach can make all the difference, even in a regular bowl of pasta!

Pasta with fresh vegetables! Just looking at it makes me hungry again.

For those with more years and experience in the arts of the kitchen, baking might be a worthwhile timekiller.

Bread is an easy and important part of any quarantiners diet. All you need is some flour, salt, yeast and water, though I like to mix some oat flakes in the flours (ratio of 1/5 of flakes in fluor). I used 10dl of water, 10dl of the oat flake/flour mix and a spoonful of salt, mixed it all in a bowl and let it raise for half an hour and then brushed it with water, made a few cuts on the surface and put it in a 200C oven for another half hours. The product was a huge loaf of bread, that's sure to keep hunger away for a week or longer!

This loaf of bread weighed a ton and tasted delicious!

A Finnish classic is the Karelian pie, and baking them is the perfect way to spend your time in self-isolation! In essence, they are small rye pockets filled with rice porridge and when fresh, they're delicious to eat with egg butter. What you need for the filling is porridge rice, milk and some salt, and for the dough itself rye flour, wheat flour, salt and oil.

The porridge rice (2dl) is first boiled in the water (2dl) and then a liter of milk is added with a teaspoon of salt. Keep stirring for half an hour and let the porridge cool off.

Now mix 3-4dl of rye flour with 1/2dl of wheat flour with 2dl of cold water, a teaspoon of salt and a spoonful of olive oil. Once you've achieved a firm dough, roll it into a long cylinder with a constant diameter and cut it into 20 pieces of equal volume. Roll out the pieces into thin, flat circles and put them aside; if you pile them up, make sure you use a lot of flour in between them. Once you have a colletion of bases, start filling them with the rice porridge, 1-2 spoonfuls should be enough for one pie. When you have placed the filling on the base, start closing the base over the filling by pinching the corners of the pie together, creating its distinctive shape, which has given the pies many humorous double meanings.

Then brush the pies with water of molten butter and put them in an oven heated to 275C fo 7-10 minutes, depending on the size of the pies. Then let them cool off and enjoy the all-Finnish experience!

Karelian pies, the local delicacy that is best when it is self-made!

Enjoy your meal!